Romanian Crossword Puzzles

Romanian newsstands sell two quite different puzzles, and the distinction matters if you came here expecting one of them. Cuvinte încrucișate — literally “crossed words” — is the numbered-clue crossword an English solver would recognise on sight: a black-and-white grid, numbers in the corner squares, and a list of Across and Down clues printed beside it.

Integrame are the other tradition, and on a Romanian magazine rack by far the more common one: the clues are printed inside the dark cells themselves, with small arrows pointing at the entry each one defines, and there is no separate clue list at all — closer to a Scandinavian arrowword than to an American crossword. The puzzles on this page are the first kind, though the Romanian vocabulary underneath is the same either style draws on.

Romanian writes with 31 letters: the Latin 26 plus Ă, Â, Î, Ș and Ț. Each is a letter in its own right and takes its own cell, so a Romanian grid is never quietly flattened to unaccented A and I the way some puzzle software handles French or Spanish.

Two of the five are a well-known source of broken text. Ș and Ț are correctly written with a comma below, but most keyboard layouts — and an enormous amount of older Romanian text on the web — produce the Turkish cedilla forms Ş and Ţ instead, which look nearly identical at body-text size and are completely different characters to a computer. The generator folds the cedilla forms onto the comma forms as words are entered, so an entry typed either way still crosses correctly rather than silently failing to match.

Q, W and Y are part of the alphabet but appear almost exclusively in loanwords and foreign names, which shifts the letters a Romanian constructor can lean on at a crossing.

Auto-fill draws on roughly 610,000 Romanian entries, with one quirk that took real work to handle. The list is built partly from subtitle files, and subtitles are typed without diacritics, so it carries a great many words twice — ASA beside AȘA, CAND beside CÂND, USA beside UȘĂ. The bare spelling is usually not a word at all. But it sometimes is: PAR is a stake and PĂR is hair, RAS is shaved and RÂS is laughter. These puzzles keep whichever of the two has a dictionary entry behind it, which is the only signal that separates them.

One limitation worth knowing up front: .puz export is switched off for Romanian. The Across Lite format predates Unicode and stores a single byte per cell, which cannot represent Ă, Â, Î, Ș or Ț without corrupting them. Romanian puzzles are shared as links and printed as PDFs instead — both of which keep the diacritics intact.